The research group is comprised of developmental psychologists who have decided to explore a unique perspective within the field of child development: the influential role of children. This perspective is unusual, because the bulk of the research on children's development focuses on how the environment affects the child, not the other way around; our group has set out to examine the opposite direction of influence. This is an extraordinary, unprecendented opportunity for a team of developmental researchers to focus in depth on how children affect their social environment and actively influence their own development.

 

 

 

Galicia, the subject of our Research Group, was an invented land, an artificial entity that acquired meaning over the course of its historical experience. Rather than being a land with a longstanding identity of its own, Galicia was created as a province of the Habsburg Monarchy as a product of the negotiations with Russia and Poland that led to the partition of Poland in 1772, and it ceased to exist as a political entity in 1918 with the defeat and dissolution of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary and its incorporation into the new Poland.

The creation of Galicia and the incorporation of the Jewish communities of the Polish kresy (borderlands) into the new Austrian province meant enormous changes. Social and educational reforms issued from Vienna transformed aspects of Jewish life. Our research group aims not only to study the phenomenon of Galicia, but also to bring the disciplines of history and literature into dialogue.

 

The production of visual models is a cognitive mechanism integral to thought. Their invention depends on the reciprocal interaction between mental imaging and strategies of textual and graphic mediation. Such devices as lists, tables, diagrams, charts and maps do not merely compile and communicate information but also have a generative power: they formalize abstract concepts, provide grids through which to process data, set in motion analytic operations that give rise to new ideas, and create interpretive frameworks for understanding the world. The medieval and early modern periods stand as a formative era during which visual structures, imagined or materialized, increasingly shaped and systematized knowledge. Yet these periods have been sidelined as theorists interested in the epistemological potential of visual strategies have defined the field of research in terms of the modern natural sciences.

The historical approach pursued by our interdisciplinary research team offers a corrective to the current scholarly trajectory. As we analyze the fundamental principles underlying visual modes of conceptualization, we will also investigate the cultural parameters that modulated diverse applications in Jewish and Christian societies. At issue are the specific ways in which visual schema function in religious and scientific discourses, how intellectual agendas and spiritual values across confessional and cultural divides might lead to analogous or different types of devices, and the impact of exchange or appropriation on the reception and circulation of particular solutions. The chronological, geographical, and civilizational scope of our collective enterprise is unprecedented.

 

Interpretation plays a pivotal role in the making of law, occasionally an act of its very construction. Recent scholarship has applied various hermeneutical theories to the study of authoritative legal-theological texts, and noted the impacts that post-modern approaches to interpretation may have on their investigation.

Our research group is a joint venture to explore the potential of research into the relations between the interpretive dimension and the development of Jewish tradition, from the first centuries CE up until the Middle Ages, against the broad background of similar problems and challenges with which scholars of other religious cultures (such as early Christianity, early Islam, and Hinduism) grapple. The group consists of four scholars of Jewish exegetical literature, one who is additionally an expert in jurisprudence at large, and three who are engaged in the research of law and exegesis in early Christianity, Islam and Hindu philosophy and literature. The group will examine the relationship between the exegetical and the legislative viewpoints in this wide scope of cultures and eras, both diachronically and synchronically, both as a literary and as an ideational phenomenon.

 

 

 

Event date: December 29, 2019 - January 9, 2020 

General Director: David Gross (UCSB, KITP)

Organizers:
Nima Arkani-Hamed (The Institute for Advanced Study)
Yonit Hochberg (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Eric Kuflik (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

 

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The field of particle physics is entering an exciting new era. While the need for new physics beyond the Standard Model is still compelling, the lack of observation of such signals challenges our preconceived notions of what the new physics should look like. It is time for fresh approaches to the longstanding puzzles of the field. A wide array of tools from a broad perspective must be used so that new physics is indeed properly searched for and eventually discovered. These new developments will be the focus of the school, whose series of lectures will start from basics and reach the cutting edge of issues and results. Topics will include: new ideas for dark matter theory and experiment, new solutions to the weak scale, precision measurements for fundamental physics, machine learning, advances in cosmology, and future tests of the Standard Model.

 

Speakers:

Nima Arkani-Hamed, The Institute for Advanced Study

Dmitry Budker, University of California Berkeley / Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz

Timothy Cohen, University of Oregon

Rouven Essig, Stony Brook University

Yuval Grossman, Cornell University

Jared Kaplan, Johns Hopkins University

Ely Kovetz, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Matthew McCullough, CERN / University of Cambridge

Joshua Ruderman, New York University

 

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